Irish women's fiction

This article focuses on Edna O'Brien's representation in her short fiction of Irish women's experiences during the 1940s and 1950s (the time of Eamon de Valera's Ireland). In particular, it examines the emotional paralysis and entrapment experienced by her female characters in the enclosed and bigoted setting of a small Irish village. O'Brien usually presents women as victims of a patriarchal society, always subjected to the pressure of restrictive gendered expectations. In particular, nationalism and religion are consistently depicted in her fiction as powerful ideologies determining women's role in their rural communities.

In Edna O’Brien’s early fiction, hunger is both physical and metaphysical: in Hiberno-English usage, to be “famished” may mean to be hungry, thirsty, or, significantly, to be cold, a concept easily stretched to ideas of alienation. This paper will examine how the anorexic/bulimic imperative of consumerism becomes a controlling force in the lives of the heroines of O’Brien’s early novels, and a conceptual “anorexia” will be used to interrogate the broader subjugation of her heroines. Food functions as a problematic facet of a woman’s life in O’Brien’s 1960s Country Girls trilogy, and in August is a Wicked Month (1965), in which concerns developed throughout the trilogy culminate. The trilogy follows the coming to maturity, marriages and subsequent disillusionment of the heroines, Baba and Cait (or Kate), who are followed from rural Ireland to Dublin and on to London. The sexual revolution-era August is a Wicked Month centres on separated thirty-something Ellen, whose son is killed while camping in England while she has a holiday affair on the continent (pps. 219-41 of attached).

THE INTERVIEW, conducted with Claire Kilroy in Dublin in September 2015, follows up one published in the Irish Literary Supplement in 2006 at the very zenith of the Celtic Tiger. Issues touched on include the psychological and fiscal impact of the boom and subsequent recession on the Irish literary writer, and concludes with a discussion of the physical, emotional, mental, and neurological fallout of childbirth and motherhood, reflecting Kilroy’s non-fiction publication, “F for Phone”, submitted to Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith’s Winter Pages just prior to the interview. With Kilroy’s blessing, a metanarrative about the obstacles to conducting the interview due to the constraints imposed by childcare was included. The scholarly overview, it is noted, “speaks to the public face of the working mother, striving to conform to the norms of her profession.” By contrast, the record of the interview’s many interruptions is an honest representation “of the behind-the-scenes compromises… that presenting that façade entails.”
THE OVERVIEW considers Kilroy’s novels All Summer (2003), Tenderwire (2006), All Names Have Been Changed (2010), and The Devil I Know (2012) as responses to free market capitalism of the Ireland of the author’s lifetime. The last is considered as an Irish response to the recent global recession that deploys the “Big House” genre, a literary tradition sustained by Irish women. In Kilroy’s novels, educated but alienated protagonists of ambiguous identity live transient lives. Stylistically, this suggests a postmodern refusal of literary conventions and stable identity, but thematically it posits the fragmentary nature of life in the postnationalist Ireland of Kilroy’s adult life. The overview concludes that future instructors seeking a representative oeuvre of the Celtic Tiger period will turn to Kilroy’s work.

In 1936, the autobiography of an old, impoverished, illiterate, Irish-speaking islandwoman named Peig Sayers was published by the Talbot Press in Ireland. It was the first literary endeavour composed by a woman to meet with critical acclaim in Irish-language literary circles. Rather than viewing Peig’s hardship in the 1920s and 1930s as a failure on the part of the Irish Free State to care for its most vulnerable citizens, those in power at the time, taoiseach Éamon De Valera and his Fianna Fáil government, quickly saw in her story a means of projecting their image of the ideal Irishwoman: a Gaelic-speaking, Catholic, hard-working mother figure, from whom indigenous Gaelic culture effortlessly emanated. Peig’s prominence and indeed dominance of the educational curriculum from the 1930s onwards has meant that her autobiography has come to symbolize the totality of Irish-language women’s literature of the early twentieth century, at the expense of other female writers, most notably Agnes O’Farrelly (Úna Ní Fhaircheallaigh) and Mollie O’Kennedy (Máire Ní Chinnéide). This essay thus explores the writings of O’Farrelly and O’Kennedy, the forgotten foremothers of Irish-language women’s literature.

Claire Kilroy attended the “First Intensive Seminar Week on Irish Studies” that Dr Pilar Villar Argáiz organised at the University of Granada (from 15th to 18th of December 2015), where the writer gave a talk about her latest novel, The Devil I Know. The aim of this interview was both to understand how the post-Celtic Tiger social context motivated not only the content of this novel but also its formal features, and to map the correlation between these two aspects. Kilroy also speaks about the political and cultural background of her book, her literary heritage, the creative process behind the composition of this novel, its characterisation devices and narrative structure, and her next writing projects.

Focusing on the lineage of pivotal African American and Irish women writers, Jacqueline Fulmer argues that these authors often employ strategies of indirection, via folkloric expression, when exploring unpopular topics. This strategy holds the attention of readers who would otherwise reject the subject matter.

Fulmer traces the line of descent from Mary Lavin to Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and from Zora Neale Hurston to Toni Morrison, showing how obstacles to free expression, though varying from those Lavin and Hurston faced, are still encountered by Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne. The basis for comparing these authors lies in the strategies of indirection they use, as influenced by folklore. The folkloric characters these authors depict-wild denizens of the Otherworld and wise women of various traditions-help their creators insert controversy into fiction in ways that charm rather than alienate readers.

Forms of rhetorical indirection that appear in the context of folklore, such as signifying practices, masking, sly civility, and the grotesque or bizarre, come out of the mouths and actions of these writers' magical and magisterial characters. Old traditions can offer new ways of discussing issues such as sexual expression, religious beliefs, or issues of reproduction. As differences between times and cultures affect what "can" and "cannot" be said, folkloric indirection may open up a vista to discourses of which we as readers may not even be aware. Finally, the folk women of Morrison, Ní Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin open up new points of entry to the discussion of fiction, rhetoric, censorship, and folklore.

When critics discuss Bernard Shaw’s influence on twentieth-century Irish literature, they often concentrate on the Shavian elements found in the work of successful dramatists, from Seán O’Casey to Brian Friel. However, in recent years, critics have increasingly come to recognise that Shaw left a significant imprint on twentieth-century Irish fiction writers, as well. As various commentators have shown, James Joyce, Kate O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, Seán Ó Faoláin, and C.S. Lewis all owed a profound debt to Shaw. Despite this new trend in the criticism, Shaw’s influence on Elizabeth Bowen – one of Ireland's greatest novelists – has yet to be appropriately recognised. Bowen’s interest in Shaw is evident from the fact that she openly refers to the playwright and his work a number of times in her literary journalism. However, it is also evident from her subtle allusions to his plays, prefaces, and essays throughout her oeuvre. For example, Bowen alludes to Pygmalion in Eva Trout, Heartbreak House in The Last September, and Village Wooing in The House in Paris. And, in various works, Bowen endorses Shavian ideas regarding Irish and English identity, as articulated in John Bull’s Other Island (the preface and the play). These include – among others – Shaw’s belief that the Irish are especially prone to cynical, humorous derision (or, as Bowen puts it in one essay, “cosmic devouring laughter”), and Shaw’s “climatological” theory regarding Irish identity (that is, the idea that the “Irish national character” is more the product of the Irish climate than ethnic origins).

In her influential article “Mothers, Monsters, Machines”, Rosi Braidotti discusses the figure of the monster as “the bodily incarnation of difference from the basic human norm; […] a deviant, an a-nomaly […] abnormal” (65). Drawing on Derrida and other contemporary French philosophers, Braidotti argues that in the binary logic which characterizes Western thought, difference is understood as “that which is other than the accepted norm” (65) and therefore, she affirms, “[w]oman as a sign of difference is monstrous” (65). Braidotti focuses mainly on the female body – and predominantly on cultural, social and political constructions of the pregnant and maternal body – as the central and paradigmatic “Other” which carries the inscription of “devalued difference” (64) and, consequently “provides the fuel for the production of normative discourse” (64). However, as any categorization of the monster is inseparable from the notion of “difference”, she also calls attention to how discourses of “monstrosity” have been historically applied to all “Others” to the heterosexual white male norm. As a consequence, these discourses emerge as extremely relevant for assessing too the processes of inclusion in and exclusion from the norm/al along the lines of not only gender but also categories such as race, sexuality and disability among others.
This article deals with the presence of monstrous and shape-shifting, mutant bodies in Emer Martin’s novel Baby Zero (2007), in order to expose the mechanics of construction of their “deviancy” as well as the Othering strategies which dislocate and displace these subjects from hegemonic western and patriarchal notions of “normality”. And, although most bodies in Baby Zero are portrayed as being somehow “out of place”, my focus will be mainly placed on the bodies of women – particularly their pregnant and maternal bodies – and the body of racialized migrant subjects, as they are represented in the novel as the primary inhabitants of the marginal(ised) space of the “Other”. The scope of the analysis will be limited to the section of the novel which is explicitly set in Ireland so as to set under scrutiny how these bodies and their perceived transgressions and strangeness feature in the process of imagining an (un)becoming Irishness. I will argue that Martin’s portrayal of monstrous maternal bodies and mutant racialised ones, literally and metaphorically transforming themselves as they try to recompose their lives as refugees in (yet) Celtic Tiger Ireland, parallels her portrayal of the country as a nation that is “painfully metamorphosing into the world” (184).

""Heather Ingman, Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women: Nation and Gender. Ashgate: Aldershot, 2007. 200 pages. No price given.

In exploring 'twentieth-century fiction by Irish women' in the light of Kristevian theories, Heather Ingman's book has to face two challenges. One is, as Ingman herself acknowledges, to examine Irish 'women's fiction [...] on its own terms' and to delineate the 'struggles of particular women to reconcile their gender with their nation' (p.4). The other is--with regard to the use of Kristeva's theories--to maintain a healthy distance from both feminism's totalitarian and oppositional impulses, as Kristeva would see it, and the totalizing tendencies of national narratives.""